Translator: Nadine Hennig
Reviewer: Fatima Zahra El Hafa I'd like for you all
to transport in time with me. We're going to go back to 1932. So my mother went
with her family to a house in 1932, and she told me about going up the stairs. I'm taking a little break to the right
and there was a room there. There were flowers.
There were people talking. She was little,
so she's looking up at everybody. And the dearly departed was there,
laid out on a chair between two boards between, well, he wasn't that big,
one board, two chairs. How many of you have seen
something like that? Yes, if you're of a certain age, perhaps. We did have a few hands raised. Fabulous. We've taken death out of the home,
and when we took death out of the home, we stopped learning about dying
and what to do about it. And we stopped learning
how to do something or what to do [when] we get scared. And when we get scared of something,
very often we stop talking about it. So we have in this country... We don't talk about death
and dying very often. I'm a death educator
and a death researcher, and that makes me a little crazy. So we're going to talk
about death and dying today. I want to start by telling you
about my mother. My mother opted to go on hospice in 2005 and she and I had
a lot of frank conversations. I said to her one afternoon, "Mom, you may have some visitors
when it's your time to go. You may have angels or family members. I don't know who's going to show up
but somebody may show up. Will you tell me if somebody comes?" And she's walking down the hall
and she looks over shoulder and she said, "It depends on who it is." (Laughter) OK, I have no idea what that means. Four months later,
she was in the hospital bed, in the living room at her house,
and her eyes were closed and I was watching her track something,
something underneath her eyelids. I said, "Mom, what do you see?" She said, "Daddy Charlie, grandmother, mother and daddy,
uncle Claude, aunt Nala." She has a beautiful smile in her face. I said, "Where are they?" "Walking up the road from the farmhouse." My brother Jim
had been gone about 13 years. He had died some 13 years beforehand
and I expected him to be there. I had had a dream that he was sitting in a chair,
his legs crossed, reading a book. So I said, "Mom, where's Jim?" "Oh, he's been right here." The night she died, my mom was reaching up
towards something I couldn't see, and I didn't know then that
that was part of deathbed phenomenon until I began my research. And here's some other things I learned. For six centuries, anecdotal accounts and a little bit of research
have detailed the auditory visual and tactile experiences
of those nearing death. Most often people are met
by friends or family members. Their purpose seems to be
to help the dying person with the death experience. And most often
these visions are comforting. People see angels. People see religious entities
that are important to them culturally. So you may see the Buddha,
or the Virgin Mary, or Yama, the Hindu god of death. People see landscapes. People hear music. Kids have kid-friendly visions. There's a story about a hospice... There was a pediatric hospital
here in San Antonio in the 80s. And the story went that there was
a boy there that was dying. He was complaining to the nurse
about the noise in the corner, the noisy boys in the corner. The nurse looked over,
and there wasn't anybody. She said, "Who's there?" And he named off three names of three kids who had been
at that hospital before he got there. These experiences happen
all over the world, all religion, all cultures, all ages. They happen to people who are blind,
they happen to people who are deaf. Some researchers say, this is
the limbic system going crazy. These are purely hallucinations. These are embedded memories
of a lifetime that are coming out. Others say, this is proof
of the souls' existence after death. Neither side can prove their hypothesis,
and my conjecture is this: it doesn't matter - sorry
for all the scientists in the room - it doesn't matter why they happen,
it matters that they do. In my research, I talked with people who are at the bedside
when somebody's dying. One wife said to me, she was talking
to her husband one afternoon and said, "Do you ever see anybody or hear anybody?" She said in her estimation,
he was completely lucid. He had had a little bit
of pain medication. He was doing a sudoku puzzle, and he said, "Yeah, there is a soldier that comes and stands by my bed
at night and keeps me company. Can't you just see him
standing there at attention? And there's a dog that comes in
and lays by my feet in the afternoon." And he went on to describe
the beloved family pet that had been their's
early in their marriage. Witnesses in my research talked about
how they saw something happening and they knew they didn't need
to do anything about it. So when Mrs Harrison walked in
and saw Mr Harrison talking to somebody, she was a little perplexed,
but she asked him about it. He was terrified to die. He had been horribly abused as a child, terrified to die, afraid his family
was going to come. Instead, on the scene came
this seven-year-old boy named Jimmy. Mrs Harrison said, she went with it. She said, "I really didn't know
what else to do. I just went with it." And Jimmy stayed with. Mr Harrison
the last two weeks of his life and kept him company and helped his transition
being an easier one as he left this world. Witnesses talked about how
they recognize that the phenomena that were happening were signs
that death was near, even when experts said
that wasn't the case. They saw the signs,
and they knew the difference between hallucinations and visions. So hallucinations, for them,
didn't have any kind of context, and were frightening,
anxiety-provoking, versus the visions, which did have a context,
and brought great comfort. When I work with families
now, I tell them, "Your person may see things you can't see, they may hear things you can't [hear], they may reach up to the sky,
they may look through you, they may talk in metaphors
about moving or leaving or going, even though they're bed bound,
they need their shoes, or they need their map,
or they need their purse, or they need to get to the stadium. They've got to get somewhere. When Mom said – just before
her three-year-old died, he said, "Daddy, the train's here.
I've got to go now." For that mom and for
other folks in my research, these visions, these deathbed phenomena,
were of great comfort to them. When we educate families
about these experiences, and we educate the patient about
these experiences, there's less fear. And, my goodness, we need
less fear around death and dying. I had the opportunity to work
with a patient named Butch. Butch which was 94,
he had congestive heart failure, and he decided he needed to go in hospice. He was ready. I got a text one afternoon
from his daughter that the visions had started
and everything was okay. His daughter talked about
how Butch was often in the other room. And this is the language she used for him
being there, talking with the unseens, versus over here, talking to the daughter
and the other people who are in the room. And he was often in the other room. So one afternoon - I forgot to say: Butch was a pretty famous rugby player,
in South Africa in his day. So one afternoon, in the other room,
the rugby team came to visit Butch. Now his family had also come. His parents had come,
his brothers and sisters. But there was the rugby team. The rugby team had come in
on really long ladders. Came down, stayed with him,
and they had a really big party. And then the rugby team left.
They left shorter ladders. And Butch was ticked because
the ladders were too short and he couldn't get up to where they were. Another day he was ticked off
because his suitcase was packed and he was ready to go,
and they left without him. Another day, he held out his hand,
and he said his daughter, "I've got these machine parts.
I don't want to lose them." This is a very common
metaphor for the dying. There is some bigger whole picture,
and their piece is missing, and they've got to make sure it's whole. He's got these parts in his hand. She went and got a Ziploc. Let me tell you why I love that –
because more often than not, people reach for medication
to quell something they don't understand. And they miss an opportunity
to connect with the person. They miss an opportunity to meet
the dying person where they are. She didn't miss it. Is any of this real? I say "Yes." Yes, it's real, because it's real
to the people that it happens to. I don't know how to measure those things that are beyond our ordinary
human capacity for understanding. I'm a researcher. I don't know
how to measure wonder. I know what it feels like.
I do know what it feels like. And I know I feel great
comfort myself when I think, that my mom didn't leave
this world by herself,– and the boy got to go on that train and Butch had his buddies
around before he left. When I meet people at parties
for the first time, think how much fun that is.
"What do you do for a living?" Me, and the sex girl, and the bacteria guy can all go together to the party. (Laughter) So we I meet them, and this happens. It is, "That's really nice.
I'm going to go get a drink." And I never see them again. (Laughter) Or something happens
like [what] happened at lunch today. "Let me tell you a story. I've been scared to tell anybody because I didn't want anybody
to think I was crazy. And I say, "My goodness.
I want to hear your story. Please tell me your story." It's these stories, yours and mine,
that are going to bring comfort and hope and calm as we help
the ones we love leave this world, and as it is our own time to go. So if you have had
a deathbed vision experience, a witness experience
with somebody you love, would you raise your hand? Ok, I would like for you,
in the next 48 hours, to tell somebody about that. The more we tell our stories, the more
we're going to eradicate this fear. And it's really important. Steve Jobs said six words before he died. October 5th, 2011, he died. "I want to invite you to engage in
your own sense of wonder as I leave you today,
minds wide open," were Steve Jobs' last words, "Oh, wow. Oh, wow. Oh, wow!" Thank you. (Applause)
